About Me

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Last night Charles and I dug out my box of the Universal
legacy collection of their classic horror films from the 1930’s and 1940’s and
decided to run one for Hallowe’en’en (well, what else do you call the day before Hallowe’en?). Alas, the
one we picked was pretty much a dog: She-Wolf of London, included as a “bonus” in the “Wolf Man” box with
the 1941 The Wolf Man, the 1943 Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man and the 1935 The
Werewolf of London (a film I’ve always
thought was underrated and far better than the 1941 reboot, though it would
have been even better if the originally set director and stars — James Whale,
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi — had made it instead of Stuart Walker, Henry
Hull and Warner Oland). Alas, She-Wolf of London was made in 1946, at the tail end of the original
Universal horror cycle, and is a film so dull that I’ve never managed to sit
through it without falling asleep — not in the 1970’s when I first saw (most
of) it on TV, not later on and certainly not last night. On the plus side, it’s
got those great old-house standing sets from the Universal back lot, lots of
fog machines working in conjunction with the sets to produce the required
Gothic atmosphere, marvelous chiaroscuro cinematography by Maury Gertsman and some surprisingly oblique camera
angles by normally straightforward director (a boy named) Jean Yarbrough. It
also has a personable cast, headed by June Lockhart as heiress Phyllis Allenby,
who fears that she’s fallen victim to the “curse of the Allenbys” — that
periodically members of her family change into werewolves and go out and kill
people randomly. A series of murders is currently being committed by the
so-called “She-Wolf of London” (the film is set at the turn of the last
century) and is being investigated by Inspector Pierce of Scotland Yard (Dennis
Hoey, who plays the part exactly
the way he played Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock
Holmes movies).

Phyllis Allenby lives with her aunt Martha Winthrop (Sara
Haden) and Martha’s daughter Carol (Jan Wiley) in the crumbling old Allenby manse, though a clumsy bit of exposition (the writers are
George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock, not exactly names to conjure with in
screenwriting history) reveals that the Winthrops are not blood Allenbys at all
and have no claim to the Allenby family fortune, to which Phyllis is sole heir.
Phyllis is engaged to barrister (British-speak for trial lawyer) Barry Lanfield
(Don Porter — incidentally Porter gets top billing on the film itself but
Lockhart gets it on the trailer — was the trailer for a reissue after Lockhart
got at least a bit of fame as the mother on the Lassie TV series and then on Lost in Space?), while Carol is dating artist Dwight Severn (a
wasted Martin Kosleck), of whom her mom disapproves because Severn is penniless
and likely to remain that way. Early on it becomes all too obvious that the
“she-wolf of London” doesn’t really exist, especially since the only evidence
of her we see is a normal-appearing woman, always seen from behind, with a hood
up over the back of her head, and though we hear various snarling and ripping
sounds as she dispatches her victims (a small boy at the beginning and an inept
policeman later on) it becomes clear that this, like the contemporaneous Devil
Bat’s Daughter from PRC, is another Gaslight knockoff in which the heroine is being convinced
that she’s a monster for some sinister purpose — and not terribly surprisingly,
the real she-wolf turns out to be Martha Winthrop, who has been drugging
Phyllis every night and smearing blood on her hands when a murder occurs so
she’ll become convinced she’s the she-wolf, she’ll either be arrested for the
murders or put in an asylum, and the Winthrops will be able to go on enjoying
the Allenby house and money indefinitely. Needless to say, she doesn’t get her
wish; she ends up chasing Phyllis through the house after Martha’s own maid
Hannah (Eily Malyon) learns what’s going on and Martha decides she’ll have to
dispatch Phyllis ahead of schedule — so she grabs a knife, chases Phyllis with
it, then falls down stairs and accidentally stabs herself, allowing Phyllis and
her nice young lawyer boyfriend to get together at the end. She-Wolf
of London is a nothing movie, thoroughly
boring and without the appeal of the contemporary Val Lewton films — the makers
seemed to be going for the nerve-wracking uncertainty of many of Lewton’s
movies over whether there is anything supernatural going on or not, but they
missed Lewton’s literacy and taste by a mile and also sacrificed the more
visceral thrills and shocks of the classic Universal style — though it’s at
least professionally made and the cast is genuinely appealing.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The film was Sin Takes a
Holiday, a 1930 production from
the U.S. branch of Pathé just before it merged with RKO (though at first the
Radio Corporation of America operated the two studios separately and it wasn’t
until they hired David O. Selznick as production chief in 1932 that he arranged
to merge the two, sensibly given what the Depression had done to the economics
of the movie industry), and it contributed a lot of people who became major RKO
hands over the years — including art director Carroll Clark, who gives us some
stunning Art Deco interiors with those huge wood-paneled doors and would later
design all but one of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films made at RKO. The
cinematographer, John Mescall, would later team with director James Whale for The
Bride of Frankenstein and the 1936 Show Boat at Universal, and the editor, Danny Mandell, would
later work in that capacity for Samuel Goldwyn for years. The director of Sin
Takes a Holiday was Paul L. Stein, a
Vienna-born filmmaker who made his directorial debut in 1918 and made his first
U.S. film, My Official Wife, a Russian-set drama taking place just before the Revolution, for Warner
Bros. in 1926. He made this film right after The Lottery Bride, a United Artists disaster (artistic and commercial) for Jeanette MacDonald in 1930, and
his next two films after Sin Takes a Holiday, Born to Love and The Common Law, were also vehicles for the star Constance
Bennett, whose billing in Sin Takes a Holiday was not only over the title but actually larger
than it! Written by Horace Jackson from a story by Robert Milton and Dorothy
Cairns, Sin Takes a Holiday is a pretty predictable film, though clearly a product of the
“pre-Code” glasnost in its
easy acceptance of divorce and marital non-permanence. Bennett plays Sylvia
Brenner, secretary to divorce attorney Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna, dull
as usual — he turned in a great performance in a small Howard Hughes-esque role
in Charles Vidor’s excellent proto-noir Sensation Hunters but every other film I’ve seen him in he’s been
stolid and unimpressive).

She’s got a decidedly unrequited crush on Gaylord,
who’s in the middle of having an affair with one of his clients, Grace Lawrence
(Rita LaRoy), only her husband (her third; Gaylord has already represented her
in getting rid of the first two) is planning to name Gaylord as the
co-respondent, and Gaylord is worried that this will kill his practice by
embarrassing him publicly. He’s also worried that Rita wants to make him
husband number four — and will extract from him as crippling a financial
settlement as she got out of husbands one and two. To avoid all this, Gaylord
accepts a suggestion from one of his wastrel friends, Richards (Louis John
Bartels), that he make a marriage in name only with someone else. Richards
boasts that he and his wife have an understanding that allows them to call
themselves married but doesn’t require them to do anything about it: they can
travel apart, they can lead largely separate lives, and they can have sex with
anyone they want — which doesn’t seem to include each other. Gaylord offers
precisely this sort of marriage to Sylvia, oblivious that she’s really in love
with him and the sort of marriage she would want with him would be the more conventional kind in
which the two people involved actually do live together, have sex only with each other, and ultimately have
children. She accepts and he immediately gives her the money for a vacation in
Paris, on which she’s followed by another of Gaylord’s friends, Reggie Durant
(Basil Rathbone), who’s obviously after Sylvia. He puts her up in an expensive
hotel (thereby giving Carroll Clark the opportunity to create another opulent set similar to the live-work space Gaylord
inhabits back in New York — indeed, one practically expects the stars of
Clark’s later films, Astaire and Rogers, to come swooping through it in the
middle of a dance number) and encourages her to buy a lot of high-fashion
clothes on Gaylord’s dime. She has her vacation, Grace does her level best to
break up her marriage to Gaylord, but eventually what we knew from reel one was
going to happen duly happens and Gaylord and Sylvia end up in a clinch, telling
us that from then on they’re going to have a real marriage and not just a paper one.

The story is
awfully pat but a director like Lubitsch might have made it genuinely
interesting; Stein, who shared little with Lubitsch but his ancestry from a
German-speaking country, does a few reasonably creative camera moves (including
a surprising number of pan shots, a technique classic-era Hollywood almost never used in interiors) but proves unable to do much
with his actors. It seems weird that in three consecutive films with Constance
Bennett he got three completely different performances out of her: in Sin
Takes a Holiday she underacts relentlessly
— as if her idea of playing a homely woman is to speak all her lines in a
monotone. She’s supposed to do a transformation from drab secretary in the
opening reels to glamorous socialite wife in the later ones, but whereas Bette
Davis would manage a similar transformation to perfection in Now, Voyager a decade later, Bennett just looks dull, drab and
droopy on both ends of the “change” and the only visible difference is she’s
dressed considerably better later on. In Born to Love Bennett and Stein seemed to overcompensate and
have her overact relentlessly, and in The
Common Law he finally got a balanced
performance out of her; as I wrote about that film previously, “If Stein didn’t
bring to The Common Law quite
the same baroque visual style he had to parts of Born to Love, he didn’t let Constance Bennett chew the scenery
and get away with the ultra-hammy gestures she’d used in the earlier film
either — and the plot was stronger this time around, too.”

But none of these three films with Stein showcases Bennett
anywhere nearly as effectively as What Price Hollywood?, the prototype for A Star Is Born she made in 1932 with Selznick producing and
George Cukor directing (superbly; Cukor would turn down the 1937 A Star Is
Born because he thought the
story was too close, but he’d change his mind when the chance to make the 1954
version with Judy Garland and James Mason came around). Sin Takes a Holiday is most notable for Basil Rathbone’s appearance;
saddled with a “roo” moustache and appallingly ill-cast (he could do dastardly
villainy and ringing heroism — well, you name me another actor, besides John Barrymore, who played
both Sherlock Holmes and Richard III! — but he’s unbelievable as a lounge
lizard threatening Our Heroine’s virtue), he’s still the most watchable person
in the movie, and though some of Rathbone’s early talkies feature an annoyingly
chipper voice, here he’s got the authoritative “Rathbone ring” that made both
his Holmes movies and the best of his villain roles (notably Sir Guy of
Gisbourne in the Errol Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood) so good and made him a star on spoken-word
records for Columbia. Here he barrels ahead through the script and Stein’s
indifferent direction, making an impression in spite of the thin material and Bennett’s numbingly
impassive performance — as if her character thought the way to fend off his
advances was to give a remarkably good impersonation of a rock. One other
quirky thing about Sin Takes a Holiday: why are both the opening and closing credits printed against the
backdrop of a picture of a yacht? No such boat appears in the film!

Monday, October 29, 2012

The film was The World
Accuses, a 1934 Chesterfield
production (which usually meant a superior product to your average independent
film of the time, with a better cast, a stronger story and more advanced
direction) which judging from the title and the synopsis on archive.org (from
whence we downloaded it) I had expected to be a gangster movie. Instead it’s a
soap opera, though a refreshingly unsentimental one for the time: it begins in
1929, when former nightclub entertainer Lola Allen is living in a lavish
apartment with her well-to-do husband John Weymouth (Paul Fix). Unfortunately,
all the couple’s bills are being paid by Weymouth’s bitchy mother Lucille
(Sarah Edwards, who judging from her performance here would have been excellent
casting as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz), who never lets a moment pass in Lola’s presence
without telling her how much she hates her, how she resents her for marrying
her son, and how she’s going to present her son with an ultimatum: divorce Lola
or be cut off from his entire inheritance. Lola gives her husband an ultimatum
of her own — either cut off relations with his mother or divorce her — and she
and John go out to a nightclub, where Lola runs into some of her former friends
and for the first time in months feels truly alive. Unfortunately, one of the
old friends she runs into is bookie “Checkers” Fraley (Harold Huber), who was
obviously one of Lola’s exes and is hoping to get her on the rebound after John
dumps her for his mother’s money. “Checkers” and John have one of those absurd
movie fights in which John is accidentally killed, and “Checkers” is arrested
and ultimately convicted (presumably of manslaughter) — but the trial we see
next is one in family court, masterminded by Lucille Weymouth, in which she
manages to get Lola declared an unfit parent and win custody of John’s and
Lola’s son Tommy.

Five years pass, long enough for Tommy to grow up from being
a baby to being played by Dickie Moore, and he’s clearly miserable in Lucille’s
huge house but Lucille has managed to succeed in one particular: she’s got him
to forget about his mother. Meanwhile, Lola has settled into a job at a nursery
— the kind that takes care of children, not the kind that raises plants — after
she collapsed at the sight of so many children (the direction by Charles
Lamont, relatively straightforward through the rest of the film, gives us a
stirring montage sequence here that made Charles joke, “They’ve gone all Soviet
Union on us!”), and not surprisingly writer Charles Belden can’t help but milk
the irony that Lola, who was earlier declared unfit by a court to raise her own
child, here is proving such a “natural” at taking care of a whole bunch of
other people’s children that the nursery’s owner, Mrs. Warren (Mary Carr),
appoints Lola to head it when she leaves town to visit her own (grown) children
preparatory to retirement. While running the nursery Lola finds herself
attracted to Hugh Collins (Russell Hopton), a radio announcer and commentator
Lola meets because he’s keeping his own daughter Pat (Cora Sue Collins, who has
curls in her hair but a refreshingly straightforward and un-Shirley Temple-like manner, a real surprise for a
girl actress in the 1930’s!) at the nursery, but the attraction ends up on hold
because on one of Hugh’s shows, right after he’s promoted Lola’s nursery as a
great place to trust with your kids, he rehashes the Weymouth case and says
that Lola “got what she deserved.” Then who should turn up at the nursery but
“Checkers,” having just broken out of prison; he blackmails Lola into letting
him stay in the nursery’s attic by saying if she doesn’t let him, he’ll reveal
who she really is. Meanwhile, Lucille Weymouth (ya remember Lucille Weymouth?) has lost her fortune, not to the Depression (as
one might have suspected) but through embezzlement by her crooked attorney; the
shock sends her into a sanitarium and leaves her near death, and Barney Barrett
(Bryant Washburn), her new (and presumably honest) lawyer, offers to take her
grandson Tommy into his own home — only before that can happen he needs a place
to park the kid, and you’ll never guess where … oh yes, you will, at least if
you’ve seen more than about 12 movies in your life.

Tommy and Pat become what
would now be called BFF’s (indeed, they seem to be headed towards one of those
weird sorts of psychologically, though not biologically, incestuous
relationships like the one between Victor and Elizabeth in Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein), and the mutual
attraction between the kids seems to be bringing the parents together even
though Lola has no idea Tommy is actually her son (remember the last time she
saw the kid, he was just a baby!). The crisis occurs when Tommy and Pat decide
to explore the attic and come across “Checkers,” who holds them hostage at gunpoint;
the kids manage to flee but their lives are imperiled because they’re hanging
on to the nursery’s deeply sloping roof for dear life. Lola thinks she has
talked “Checkers” into surrendering when “Checkers” hears a police siren and
thinks he’s been tricked; eventually he goes out onto the roof to chase Tommy
and Pat, but a police sniper manages to pick him off without hurting the kids.
Lola learns at last that Tommy is her son, and Barrett says he’ll release Tommy
to her custody. Needless to say, Hugh changes his mind about Lola and her
morals, and there’s a charming ending scene with Tommy and Pat in twin beds in
the children’s room sagely commenting on the union of their parents. The
World Accuses is a rather ballsy title
for so obviously a “women’s picture,” but within the limits of the form it’s a good story, effectively directed and acted and with
surprisingly little sentimentality for a 1934 film in which two of the key
protagonists are children — but perhaps it was still early enough in Shirley Temple’s
run as the number one star of the 1930’s for her example to shape how all movie children were depicted.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

The film was Wise Girl, a 1937 weirdie from RKO that took a pretty
typical trope — the fish-out-of-water meeting between two people representing
polar opposites on the socioeconomic scale — and ran with it in some pretty
crazy and surprisingly entertaining directions. It was shown recently as part
of a TCM tribute to Miriam Hopkins, who stars as Susan Fletcher, spoiled-brat
daughter of a tycoon (Henry Stephenson) who’s so powerful the town they live in
is called “Fletcherville.” Fletcher père is upset that his two grand-nieces, Joan (Betty Philson) and Katie
(Marianna Strelby), have been raised since the death of their parents by their
uncle John O’Halloran (Ray Milland), a Bohemian artist who was living in France
with the girls and their parents, and when the parents died he brought them to
the U.S. and they’ve settled in a Greenwich Village boarding house which opens
up onto a surprisingly lavish-looking patio (a set later reused as the New
Mexico town square in the Val Lewton production The Leopard Man). O’Halloran makes a living, more or less, as a
sign painter for Walker’s department store and as a “second” for another member
of his artists’ colony, Mike (Guinn Williams, in a far more normal comic-relief
role for him than his part as the villain in Lucky Star), who’s both a prizefighter and a sculptor.
Another member of the colony is Karl Stevens (Walter Abel), a painter John knew
in Europe who’s descended into alcoholism following the death of his wife.
(That’s a surprise — a Ray Milland movie in which someone else is the alcoholic!)

Susan Fletcher decides to move
to New York, pose as a poor starving actress, get a room at the boarding house
and document that John is an unfit guardian for her nieces — only in the
meantime she falls in love with John, who naturally turns against her when he
finds out who she is and why she came there. It’s a pretty familiar story but
the script is full of weird twists and turns that make this into a genre-bender one could readily have imagined Preston
Sturges coming up with five years or so later — the credited writers are Allan
Scott (who did script-polishing on most of the Astaire-Rogers musicals and
brought the same charm and wit here) and Charles Norman, though according to
the American Film Institute Catalog Viola Brothers Shore and Harold Kussell were assigned to “polish” the
screenplay but it’s not clear whether any of their work ended up in the final
film. It was also originally slated to be produced by P. J. Wolfson (Edward
Kaufman ended up with the final producing credit) and to star Cary Grant —
which would probably have made the film better known, at least, though Milland
is perfectly credible in the role of the Bohemian artist continually undone by
his pride. At one point he and Susan are hired to pose as Bohemians for a
dinner party for $3 plus a free dinner — and he has her dress in a ridiculously
patterned gown that is also way too big for her (and Mike, adding dressmaking to his weird mix of
talents, puts pins in it to try to get it into some correspondence with her actual size) — and at
another point he takes her to Mike’s prizefight, she gets offended at the
beating Mike is taking from the other fighter, she grabs the other fighter’s
leg, Mike punches out the referee, Susan pulls down the champion and the
referee acclaims her as the
winner of the bout.

It gets even weirder than that: John gets Susan a job doing
a sort of live commercial for Walker’s Department Store’s products in the
window of their store — and the audience that gathers snickers at the blatancy
of the plugs as well as Susan’s bad delivery of her lines — and it ends, of
course, in a comic catastrophe that gets them both fired. Eventually the kids are taken away from
John in a family-court proceeding with Margaret Dumont — who did make some great movies that didn’t also feature
the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields — as the pompous do-gooder “Mrs.
Bell-Rivington” who is masterminding the proceedings and has placed the girls
in a juvenile care home pending their placement with the Fletchers in their manse, and Susan engineers John’s arrest and
incarceration in the Fletcherville jail for six months (it’s the same jail set
that Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant did time in in Bringing Up Baby, made six months later) with the proviso that he
won’t get anything to eat or drink until he
completes a painting for a New York art contest with a $2,000 grand prize.
Instead of painting, the bitter John uses the canvas sent into him under the
cell door to do a caricature of Susan and her father, which earns him $1,000
and a job as a caricaturist for a New York publisher. The final scene shows
Susan and John in a clinch on top of the stairs in the Fletcherville mansion —
the living room is so huge that any moment one expects Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
and a bevy of chorines to swoop in for a production number — with the kids able
to have the father-figure they love and the untold riches of the Fletchers.

As I noted above, it’s a familiar
plot that was probably considered trite even then, but it’s also done with a rare sense of style
(the director was RKO hack Leigh Jason but this is definitely more a Schreiber movie than an auteur movie) and Miriam Hopkins’ real-life bitchiness
and determination to upstage everyone she acted with (both Edward G. Robinson
and Bette Davis said she was the most unpleasant co-star they ever had)
actually works for this particular role. I was wondering if this was a remake
of The Smartest Girl in Town (which RKO made a year earlier with Gene Raymond and Ann Sothern), which
had a similar plot, but in that one it was the girl who was genuinely poor and
the guy who was rich but pretending to be poor to get close to her. It was certainly a fun film, well worth
seeing and a cut above what one would expect from Hopkins (who was on her way
down from the “A” list) and Milland (who was on his way up to the “A” list), a hack director and a 69-minute running time. One
nice little in-joke: at the dinner party she’s been hired to attend for
“atmosphere,” Susan’s moods change so rapidly one of the other guests compares
her to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Miriam Hopkins had been in the Paramount Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film from 1932, playing
the music-hall girl “Champagne Ivy” that gets a crush on Jekyll and is raped
and ultimately murdered by Hyde (Fredric March).

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Last night Charles and I
settled in relatively late and watched a 1938 MGM “B” called Woman Against
Woman (produced and written by
Edward Chodorov, directed by Robert B. Sinclair, starring Herbert Marshall, Virginia
Bruce and Mary Astor, and only 61 minutes long) on the same disc I’d recorded
from TCM as also contained The Case of the Velvet Claws, Midnight Court and The Divorce of Lady X and all of which seemed to have been paired
because they deal with estranged couples and have scenes taking place in
courtrooms. Before it, though, TCM had shown a screamingly funny Robert
Benchley short called See Your Doctor, even more delightful than most of the Benchley shorts because a) he’s
playing a character — put-upon suburban husband Joseph A. Doakes (ironically “Joe
Doakes” was also the name of the series Warner Bros. cooked up with actor Dave
O’Brien to compete with the Benchley shorts at MGM), who is digging in his
garden when he’s stung by a bee. Only his obnoxious brother-in-law (Hobart
Cavanaugh) gets him scared that he might really have been bitten by a black widow spider and
insists he go to the E.R. — where he’s put upon first by an obnoxious nurse who
keeps tearing up his admission form and filling out a new one on the flimsiest
of pretexts (the district where Benchley/Doakes lives, the fact that an
out-of-towner brought him, etc.) in a grim satire of medical bureaucracy that
rings true even now, then by
the doctor himself (it was one of those sights where you encounter a person you
know you’ve seen in a million
other movies and you think, “Monty Woolley? Here?” — and it was indeed he,
probably appearing in this film unbilled as a favor to his old friend from the
Algonquin Round Table days), who’s trying to look at Doakes’ wound while
simultaneously talking to a child patient on the phone, and in the end of
course it turns out to be a bee sting, it’s already healed by the time the
doctor sees it, and the doctor sends our hapless hero home. (Today, of course,
he’d send his insurance company a four-figure bill!)

Woman Against Woman is an O.K. soap opera with comic overtones, based
on a story by Margaret Culkin Banning called “Enemy Territory.” It opens with
attorney Stephen Holland (Herbert Marshall) feeling immensely put-upon by his
wife Cynthia (Mary Astor). He wants them to find a smaller and cozier place to
live; she insists on them remaining where they are. He wants to keep Dora
(Sarah Padden), the nurse who raised him during his own childhood and is now
looking after his daughter Ellen (Juanita Quigley, yet another of the Shirley
Temple wanna-bes that clogged casting offices in the 1930’s), but she insists
she won’t work another day under the same house as Cynthia. Eventually Stephen
and Cynthia have an argument and, though they’re relatively genteel about it,
he insists that he’s not going to stay another night under her roof, moves out
and announces his intention to file for divorce. This is complicated by the
fact that Stephen’s mother (Janet Beecher) is on Cynthia’s side. But after five
years (that’s how long the script tells us they’ve been married, though Juanita
Quigley looks more like about eight than five) Stephen is tired of being
bitched at and ordered about by his wife. He gets an assignment to argue a
patent infringement case before the appellate court in Washington (not the Supreme Court, despite a mistake to that
effect on the imdb.com page) and while he’s there he meets Maris Kent (Virginia
Bruce) and the two fall in love after a weird drinking scene in a hotel room in
which they’re having a good (though Production Code-safe) time and she warbles
a bit of the Cole Porter classic “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” — which Virginia
Bruce had introduced as the bitchy second lead in the Eleanor Powell-James Stewart
musical Born to Dance two
years earlier. They marry — by then he and Cynthia have got legally divorced —
only they have a problem: Stephen’s practice is in the small town where he and
Cynthia are living, and the town’s other married women join forces with Cynthia
and snub Stephen’s new bride. Eventually the cold war between them gets to the
point where Stephen finds himself torn between the two women — he no longer
loves Cynthia but wants a modus vivendi with her, if only so he can keep seeing his daughter — and Cynthia
finally tries what would now be called “the nuclear option”: she threatens to
move across country so Stephen will never see Ellen again. The film has a
daringly “open” ending for the time; Cynthia backs off her threat, but then
says she’s going through with it after all, and Stephen has to choose between
being a presence in his daughter’s life and staying with his new wife and
making the remarriage work.

In some ways Woman Against Woman is a reworking of Dodsworth, the 1936 screen adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s
novel, also about a married man torn between an increasingly bitchy wife and
another woman who genuinely and selflessly loves him — though that film had cast Ruth Chatterton as the bitch and
Mary Astor as the nice woman! Astor’s performance is considerably more vicious
than the script necessitated — early on I joked that she was meaner than she’d
been in The Maltese Falcon, in which she played a murderess — and what appeal this film has is
mainly due to the fineness of the acting (and as a Virginia Bruce fan who
thinks she was ill-used by the major studios — her best film by far is the 1934
Monogram version of Jane Eyre — it was nice to see
her get to be the good girl for a change!) even though Herbert Marshall had
played this sort of role many times before (i.e., The Painted Veil) and would play it many times afterwards (i.e., The
Letter). An interesting comment on the film on imdb.com pointed out the multiple marital histories of several of the personnel connected with it: original author Margaret Culkin Banning had two husbands, Herbert Marshall had five wives, Mary Astor three husbands and Virginia Bruce four. “Wow, they sure had the
right cast making this one about divorce and marriage," the reviewer, "ksf-2," said.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

This morning I also watched the 1958 horror film The
Monster of Piedras Blancas, a knock-off of The
Creature from the Black Lagoon produced
independently in New England and directed by Irvin Berwick, who had designed
the original “Creature” makeup, felt he hadn’t got either the recognition or
the money he deserved, and so decided to concoct his own story of an aquatic
monster. It’s a quirky movie, with blatant visual quotes not only from
Creature but from the original Frankenstein as well (the monster abducts the heroine from her
bedroom, and later throws her father from the lighthouse tower the way Henry
Frankenstein fell from the burning windmill during his fight to the death with his Monster), unusually well photographed for an
independent production from the late 1950’s (though there’s an oddly Ed Woodian
clip of a stock shot of two men running from the shore inserted into a chase
scene out of the usual laziness of B-movie producers of this era, which stands
out only because the rest of the film has a tightly-lit, well-photographed
“studio” look to it, courtesy of Universal, who since they were near financial
collapse when this film was made, were only too happy to loan out contract
players and technical people to this independent production merely to keep them
employed at someone else’s expense).

Berwick is perhaps a little too reticent about showing the monster — we see its hand
in a pre-credits sequence, then its shadow about 40 minutes later, then its
midriff and arm (holding the severed head of one of its victims!) and not until
the last 15 minutes of the film do we see it full-figure — and though his
actors were several cuts above Ed Wood’s, they have to do interminable dialogue
scenes in which we’re given narrative flashbacks encompassing key plot points (actual filmed flashbacks would have been better, but would have
blown the budget). The Monster of Piedras Blancas is one of those movies that is so tightly conceived
within the bounds of its genre
that it’s utterly predictable in structure and plot development — which has a
certain appeal, actually; its makers acknowledged that their only intent was to
scare audiences, and it probably worked back then. I’d wanted to see this movie
ever since my childhood, when I read about it in a Famous Monsters of
Filmland back issue from the time it was
made — and again when Filmfax
magazine gave a full account of its making a few years ago, and put the titular
monster on its cover (in a much more brightly-lit still than anything we see in
the movie itself!). My brother and I used to take turns enacting the part of
the “Monster of Pious Blancas” (that was as close as he could come at the time
to pronouncing the title!) and its latest victim — it’s an example of how tight
a genre film this is that we
could pretend to be in a movie we hadn’t seen! — and when Filmfax wrote it up, and now that American Movie Classics
has actually shown it and I’ve videotaped it, it’s like I’ve finally completed
an unfinished bit of my childhood. — 8/24/96

•••••

Charles and I managed to squeeze in a movie last night: The
Monster of Piedras Blancas, a 1958
production from a short-lived independent company called Vanwick, after the two
partners who founded it, producer Jack Kevan and director Irvin Berwick. I
remember reading years ago in an article in Filmfax that this film was shot on location in Massachusetts
(it was actually in California, but where in California the sources on imdb.com’s message boards disagree:
either the fairly well known Point Concepcion lighthouse or the lesser-known
one in Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay, where the “white rocks” of the title
actually do exist) and that the people involved in it had just been laid off
from Universal-International (the studio was in the process of being sold to
MCA and the new owners were cleaning out what they thought would be deadwood)
and decided to do a film on their own that would aim at the Universal horror
market, or what was left of it by 1958. It helped that Jack Kevan had actually
designed the costume for the Gill-Man in Creature from the Black
Lagoon and its two sequels, and so he made
a similar costume for the title character of this one and actually played the
monster himself. I first heard of this movie in one of the few copies of the
magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland
I ever owned, which profiled this film extensively when it was still new; my
brother and I got hold of a copy several years later and pretended we were
being chased by the “Monster of Pious Blancas” (the closest my brother could
come to pronouncing the title) — which the last time Charles and I watched this
together (over a decade ago, from a tape I recorded from AMC back when it still
was a classic-movie channel) I noted was an indication of how solidly grounded
a genre piece this was that my
brother and I could pretend to be in a movie neither of us had actually seen.
Anyway, the movie holds up pretty well — we were watching a Sinister Cinema DVD
and some of it was awfully dark-looking, and I wasn’t sure whether the darkness
was intended by director Berwick and cinematographer Philip Lathrop or was an
artefact of the print we were watching and/or our rapidly fading old-fashioned
pre-digital TV set.

It’s clearly a monster-movie formula picture, and a bit
slow — we’re 45 minutes into its 71-minute running time before we finally see the monster full-figure (though the original
trailer showed it, which I can’t help thinking was a mistake: I’ve always
thought the best promotion for a horror movie was one which “teased” you with a
bit of the monster without showing it all; instead you’ll have to pay for a
ticket to see the whole thing!), and the exposition moves at the speed of a
drugged camel as we learn that the village lighthouse keeper, Sturges (John
Harmon), was happy and relatively normal until his wife died. Then he became an
embittered recluse, hiding out in the lighthouse with only three beings for
company: his daughter Lucille (Jeanne Carmen); his dog Ring; and the Monster of
Piedras Blancas, the last surviving representative of a water-dwelling reptile
called a Diplovertubron,
previously thought to be extinct. The idea of a lonely old lighthouse keeper,
embittered by the death of his wife, should turn to a man-eating monster for
companionship is weird enough as it is, but he also gets into hissy-fits with
the owner of the local store, Kochek (Frank Arvidson), when Kochek sells to
someone else the “meat scraps” with which he feeds the monster and thereby
keeps it from eating humans … not that that always works, since we soon learn
from the local police constable, George Matson (Forrest Lewis), that there have
been mysterious deaths off the coast before, besides the one he’s currently
investigating in which two brothers who ran a fishing boat were found with
their heads sliced off their bodies and every drop of blood drained out of
them.

Eventually Dr. Sam Jorgensen (Les Tremayne, top-billed) and his assistant
Fred (Don Sullivan), who’s also Lucille Sturges’ boyfriend, figure out what the
monster is and what a challenge it will be either to kill it or take it alive, which
Jorgensen and Fred want to do because a living specimen of a Diplovertubron or something similar will tell us a lot we need to
know about evolution. Director Berwick clearly learned something from Jack Arnold’s and John Sherwood’s work on the
Gill-Man movies, and though he’s not much for suspense or pace there are times
when he shows an interesting eye (notably in the shots of old man Sturges
glimpsed through the distorting lenses by which the lighthouse works) and he’s
quite good at coming up with horrific images and not keeping them on the screen so long they become
merely disgusting instead of scary. The most famous scene in the film is the
one in which the Monster makes its first full-figure appearance carrying the
head of its latest victim — and though just about everyone who’s seen this film
remembers it, Berwick keeps it on the screen only for a few seconds, just long
enough for us to register it without parading the gore in our faces. The ending
is a bit disappointing — for a monster whose skin is so tough it broke off part
of a meat cleaver, it’s hard to believe it could be killed merely by throwing
it off the top of a lighthouse (it lands in the water, its natural element,
which made me wonder whether Kevan, Berwick and writer H. Haile Chase were
setting us up for a sequel) — and it utterly lacks the shards of pathos of the
Gill-Man movies, but it’s still a fun film in a limited genre even though one could also readily imagine it as Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 fodder! — 10/17/12

Monday, October 15, 2012

The film was Midnight Court, a typical 1937 “B” from Warner Bros. that featured Ann Dvorak and John
Litel (not exactly names to conjure with in Hollywood history) in a
surprisingly grim tale about an auto-theft ring being led by Al Kruger (William
Davidson) and his sidekick/enforcer Slim Jacobs (Stanley Fields). They get
homeless teenagers to steal cars for them, then repaint them, alter their
serial numbers and sell them as supposedly “legitimate” used cars. Kruger says
to Slim that the only person he has to worry about is former district attorney
Victor Shanley (John Litel), who thanks to Kruger’s connections was defeated
for re-election two years before and is now a major alcoholic, hanging out at
the skid-row place Kruger owns and getting himself busted for vagrancy and
intoxication in a police raid. (The fact that the cops could just walk into a bar
and bust everybody there for no particular reason is pretty chilling in and of
itself.) Victor ends up in night court, where his ex-wife Carol O’Neil (Ann
Dvorak) is the court reporter, but he’s bailed out by Kruger, who wants to
sober up Victor so he can become the attorney for his gang. Victor goes along —
screenwriters Don Ryan (who apparently was a Los Angeles reporter who
specialized in covering night courts) and Kenneth Gamet depict him as so
embittered by his fall that he’s willing to put his ethics aside and do
whatever corrupt work Kruger wants from him, especially since it turns out to
be lucrative — and in his first trial as Kruger’s “mouthpiece” he wins the
acquittal of Bob Terrill (Carlyle Moore, Jr.), a basically decent kid who got
caught up in Kruger’s auto-theft ring. Victor tries to have it both ways, doing
Kruger’s dirty work but also courting his ex and trying to convince her to come
back to him by saying he’s still basically a decent guy. He reaches out to Bob,
offering to help him go to college if he straightens out and quits Kruger’s
operation, but Kruger, afraid that if Bob makes a legitimate life for himself
he’ll rat out the gang, has Slim kill him and fake it to look like either an
accident or suicide by sticking his body into one of the stolen cars and
sending it off a cliff. (This being a 60-minute “B” at the lowest end of
Warners’ output, this scene is not actually shown.)

Victor is appalled, and
when Carol chews him out and says he’s basically responsible for Bob’s death,
he agrees and gets himself fired by Kruger. Two months later Victor appears in
night court again and agrees to serve as special prosecutor in the case against
Kruger and Slim, who’ve finally been busted by the police. Naturally, Kruger’s
new lawyer challenges Victor’s appearance, noting that he can’t use anything he
learned about Kruger when he was working for him because it would violate
attorney-client privilege, but Victor convinces the judge (Joseph Crehan) that
he’ll base the case entirely on things that happened after he stopped working for Kruger. Using a blank piece
of paper as a bluff, Victor claims that Bob kept a list of the original serial
numbers of all the cars Kruger’s ring stole and altered, and he tricks Slim
into confessing that the cars were
altered. Some of Kruger’s men smuggle guns into the courtroom and try to kill
Victor in mid-trial, but Carol catches on and sneaks out a note to the police,
who arrive in time to shoot down the gunmen instead, and Victor has both his
moral redemption and his reconciliation with Carol. There’s nothing
particularly surprising about this film except the way it anticipates a later
(and much better movie), Party Girl
(1958), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Robert Taylor as a corrupt Mob
attorney (in that case Taylor is disabled — he has a limp in his leg — and he
gets surgery that corrects both his physical disability and, in effect, his
moral one: the idea was he turned corrupt because of his bitterness over his
condition) who eventually comes clean and helps bust the Mob boss (Lee J. Cobb)
he used to work for. Ray’s film is considerably deeper, richer, longer and
better acted (Robert Taylor was one of those performers who actually improved as an actor once he aged and could no longer “coast”
on his looks) but the two track surprisingly closely plot-wise, and Midnight
Court is a nice example of the sort of
reliable, professionally made entertainment the studios could do even on a “B”
budget.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

The film was Lucky Star,
a 1929 production from (pre-20th Century) Fox and the third in their
successful series of films co-starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. It was
shown as part of the series on the depictions of disabled people in films that
Turner Classic Movies is running every Tuesday this month, and it fit into the
tear-jerker mold of the two previous Gaynor-Farrell films, Seventh
Heaven (one of the two films, along with Sunrise, that won Gaynor the first Academy Award for Best
Actress; in the earliest days the award was given for one’s entire body of work
in a given year, not just one particular film) and Street Angel, both directed, as was Lucky Star, by Frank Borzage. The story began as an awkwardly
titled novel, Three Episodes in the Life of Timothy Osborn, by Tristram Tupper, and was adapted into a screenplay
by Sonya Levien. It was one of those early films on the cusp of the
silent-to-sound transition that was released both ways, as a straight-on silent
and as a sound film with a Movietone music track and four sequences of
dialogue, and the listing on the film in the chapter on Gaynor and Farrell in
James Robert Parish’s book Hollywood’s Great Love Teams gives credit to both the dialogue writer (John
Hunter Booth) and the title writers (Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell).
Alas, all that seems to survive is the alternate silent version, made for
theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound, and the sole extant print was
discovered in the Netherlands and both the opening credits and all the titles
were in Dutch. The film was restored at the George Eastman House, and they drew
on various sources, including a cutting continuity of the sound version, the
source story and the Dutch titles, to write a new set of titles in English that
were serviceable except for the forced rural-dialect spelling of some of the
words. Certainly the film was easy to follow, and though it was a bit less
path-breaking than Ben Mankiewicz and his co-host on TCM made it seem — its
basic plot (a World War I veteran returns from the war with a disability and
tries to resume his relationship with the girl he was seeing before he left)
had been done four years earlier in The Big Parade (one of the blockbuster mega-hits of the silent era
and a movie that no doubt would have still been remembered by the original
audiences for Lucky Star) — it
turned out to be an utterly haunting movie.

In his book on John Ford, Tag
Gallagher argued that Friedrich Murnau’s signing by Fox and the success
(artistic and commercial) of his
film Sunrise strongly influenced
Fox’s other directors, including Ford and Borzage, and while I didn’t think
much of that theory when I read his book, the more late-1920’s Fox films I
actually have had a chance to see, the more correct it seems to be. Lucky
Star looks like a German movie of the
period — the oblique camera angles, the forced perspective of the sets, the
careful framing and painterly lighting, and most obviously the fact that
virtually the entire movie was shot inside a soundstage even though it’s set in
a rural community and quite a lot of it takes place outdoors. Gaynor plays Mary
Tucker, a teenage farm girl (when the film starts she’s still 17) who’s worked
nearly to death and frequently brutalized by her hard-bitten mother (Hedwiga
Reicher) — obviously Mary’s dad died in the backstory and one reason mom is so
hard on her (and on her siblings, though we get so few shots of the rest of the
family we’re not sure how many kids there are — aside from one kid sister,
Milly, played by Gloria Grey) is that they’ve got to keep the farm going pretty
much by themselves. One of their few sources of income is selling milk to the
linemen working on the local phone lines (so the community, though rural, is
developed enough to have
telephone service in 1917 — a lot of places still didn’t), which Mary is seen
diluting with water so it’ll go farther. She has two large canisters which she
intends to sell for a nickel to the boss of the outfit, Martin Wrenn (Guinn
“Big Boy” Williams, known primarily for the comic-relief roles he played in
1930’s films like Kelly the Second
but here cast as the villain!), only when Martin throws the coin at her instead
of handing it to her, she steps on the nickel and claims she never got it.
Martin and his underling, Timothy Osborn (Charles Farrell), get into a fight on
top of a telephone pole — like Rudolph Valentino and Walter Long in Moran
of the “Lady Letty,” they have to flail at
each other with one arm each while using the other arm and their legs to hold
on — and when Timothy realizes that Mary has deceived both of them and
needlessly put their lives at risk, he literally takes her over his knees and spanks her long and
hard. Meanwhile, Timothy has overheard a message going out over the line they
were working on that the U.S. has got involved in World War I, and both he and
Wrenn enlist.

Overseas, Timothy’s legs are crushed by a water truck that
overturns, and when we see him again he’s living alone in a cabin and spending
his time racing his wheelchair from room to room — he’s proud of how fast he
can move in it (and a shot of steam rising from a meal he's cooking in the background reveals Charles Farrell really is moving that fast in the chair; it's not fast-motion photography) — and building gadgets, some of them quite elaborate in a Rube
Goldberg sort of way (including a system of pulleys by which he can lower a
bucket into the nearby lake and thereby get himself water). It’s not clear how
he supports himself financially, though we were probably meant to think he
makes his living by selling some of his devices. When Mary first sees him —
she’s thrown a rock through his cabin window as a joke — he appears in the
window and carefully conceals his disability from her as long as possible, but
eventually she comes in and he’s “outed.” (This gimmick was used in the 1935
film The Dark Angel — also about
a returning World War I veteran, though in that case he was blind instead of in
a wheelchair — and it’s possible this scene appears in the 1923 silent version
of The Dark Angel, which I’ve
never seen, and Borzage and his writers copied it.) She and Tim start a
relationship of sorts, which leads her to dress better (thanks to some money
from the sale of their farm’s produce which she keeps from her mother —
something Tim lectures her about when she confesses it to him), bathe and wash
her hair in eggs (a scene that led me to joke, “Tim, when you said you’d make
me an omelet, I didn’t think this was what you had in mind!”). Unfortunately,
Mary’s mom doesn’t want her to tie herself down to a cripple (the C-word is
actually used in the titles); instead she encourages Mary to marry Wrenn,
believing that he’s still in the army (they threw him out after the war ended,
but he still wears his uniform), that he has money and he’ll be able to
guarantee her a good life in a large city. Mary is about to go off on the train
with Wrenn when Tim, who in a previous scene had practiced getting out of the
wheelchair and using crutches — only to find his legs still couldn’t support
his weight — tears off towards Mary’s house, then when he sees the sleigh
that’s taking Mary and Wrenn to the train, he goes to the train station, and
somehow he’s able to pull himself along on the crutches until the power of
Mary’s love miraculously gives him the strength to walk, and the last shot of
the film is Mary and Tim standing together on the tracks of the departed train,
with him standing proud and tall as they embrace.

The ending of this movie has
rightly been criticized as preposterous — “The scenario asked viewers to accept
the adage that love can conquer all, and that this love would give paralyzed
[sic — we’re never actually told the exact nature of Tim’s injury] Farrell the
strength to crawl over the hill to Gaynor’s farm and then the energy to lick
the equally big-framed Guinn Williams,” Parish wrote — and yet the film overall
is so intense and moving, and (until that strange ending) so true to the life
of a person living with a disability, that Lucky Star triumphs over its ending. Much of what makes the
film great is Farrell’s performance — which, compared to his rather empty
juvenile performances in the other films I’ve seen him in, Sunnyside
Up and Delicious, suggests he was actually an actor more suited to
the silent screen than to sound. The high point of his acting occurs when Mary
changes clothes at his place so she can attend a dance at the Firemen’s Hall —
where she’ll dance with the able-bodied Wrenn and give him the idea that she’d be
interested in him. Farrell’s
acting when she leaves him behind is utterly convincing and surprisingly
understated, almost Chaplinesque in its careful delineation of pathos; he’s
also utterly believable as a person who, even if only temporarily, has lost the
use of his legs. (The scene in which, having fallen down while trying to use
his crutches, he has to drag himself across his living-room floor and lift
himself up by his arms to get back in his wheelchair is especially convincing;
Farrell manages to drag his legs behind him and make them look like dead
weight.) Unfortunately, Fox, the Eastman House, TCM or whoever outfitted this
film with one of Christopher Caliendo’s spiky scores, relying mostly on piano,
flute and harp and making the film seem considerably more dire than Borzage and
his writers probably intended — and Caliendo misses one sound effect that would
have made the movie more convincing: when Tim plays a portable phonograph (one
he’s made himself and gives to Mary during the course of the story), Caliendo
should have broken off his own music and used a record of the period instead.

Overall, Lucky Star (a title
never explained in the film itself) is a great movie that could have been even
better, especially if the character of Wrenn had been made less of a villain
and more of a Ralph Bellamy type (ironically Bellamy himself played a person in
a wheelchair in the 1935 film Hands Across the Table), the sort of man who’s a perfectly nice guy and a
decent match for the heroine but who doesn’t excite or move her as much as Tim
does. Even that preposterous ending could have been made more credible if Tim
had been shown using one of his homemade gadgets to give himself
range-of-motion exercises in his bed (if he could devise a system of pulleys
and ropes to get water without having to go outside for it, he could surely
have made his own exerciser from similar materials!), and if the writers had
inserted a bit of exposition to the effect that whatever physical damage had
been done to his legs had healed and it was only the emotional burden and the fear of failure that was still
keeping him dependent on the wheelchair. (In more recent films with this
premise that’s usually been supplied by two doctors anxiously discussing the
case, but Lucky Star may be unique
among films about disability in never showing any of the protagonist’s medical care.) Lucky
Star is one of those films that could have
been better, but it’s a marvelous movie just the way it is — and having worked
as caregiver for a disabled man for almost 30 years (until his recent death) I
can attest that the way Tim’s character is drawn, with a thin veneer of pride
over a deep (if eventually overcome) self-pity, is pretty close to the real
thing — indeed, between the disabled character and the domineering mother, in
some ways watching this film was a busman’s holiday for me!

Saturday, October 13, 2012

I ran the one movie in the Warners’ Perry Mason series from
the 1930’s that I hadn’t seen before (in the early 1990’s I recorded all the
other five from the TNT network, which was then sort of the Beta version of
TCM, cursed with commercial breaks but still showing a lot of great movies from
the MGM and Warners catalogs that were otherwise unavailable): The Case of
the Velvet Claws, fourth in the sequence
and the last with Warren William as Mason. (William played it for the first
four, number five — The Case of the Black Cat — featured Ricardo Cortez, and number six, The
Case of the Stuttering Bishop, starred
Donald Woods, horrendously miscast as Mason; I can’t help wishing Warners had given
the last one to Bogart so that all three of their Sam Spades would also have
played Perry Mason.) In this one he and Della Street (Claire Dodd) actually get
married at the beginning of the show — by a woman night-court judge played by,
of all people, Clara Blandick (who was so obscure even Aljean Harmetz, in her
book The Making of “The Wizard of Oz” — in which she played Auntie Em — couldn’t find any of her previous
credits) — and the gimmick is that he keeps being torn away from his honeymoon
to solve a new case involving Eva Belter (Wini Shaw, wasted as usual; it’s
amazing that this woman got to star in one of the most iconic moments of 1930’s
cinema, as the lead in Busby Berkeley’s astonishing “Lullaby of Broadway”
number in Gold Diggers of 1935,
but seemed ill-used in all her other appearances), a married woman who was
caught stepping out on her husband with state legislator Peter Milnor (Kenneth
Harlan) by a reporter for the scandal sheet Spicy Bits. She hires Mason to make the story go away and hopefully
get the proprietor of Spicy Bits
arrested for blackmail; what she doesn’t realize is that her own husband,
George C. Belter (Joseph King), is the secret publisher of Spicy
Bits. Her husband is shot dead and she’s
accused of the crime, especially since she did actually shoot at him, but it turns out the real
killer is Belter’s nephew, Carl Griffin (Gordon Elliott), who took advantage of
the confusion after Eva’s shot missed to fire a shot with his own gun (which
must have been the same caliber since the two spent shells look identical when
Mason recovers them), thereby hopefully taking advantage of the fact that Mr.
Belter had just disinherited his faithless wife and made his nephew his heir.

This is probably the weakest of the Warners Masons plot-wise (apparently it was
butchered in the adaptation and the meaning of the title in Erle Stanley
Gardner’s original novel — a piece of anti-feminist propaganda — was deleted)
and was clearly yet another attempt by Warners to get their own share of the
gold MGM was making on the Thin Man
movies (a married detective, a case involving their high-living acquaintances
and a formidable amount of on-screen alcohol consumption), and it also doesn’t
help that Mason’s investigator, Paul Drake, was here called “Spudsy” and played
for the usual so-called “comic relief” by Eddie Acuff. The Warners Masons are
interesting movies, and the first three with William are worthwhile — The
Case of the Howling Dog for a good-bad
performance by Mary Astor anticipating her work in (what else?) The
Maltese Falcon (she appeared with Ricardo
Cortez as well and therefore made movies with all three Sam Spades); The
Case of the Curious Bride for Errol Flynn’s
first U.S. screen appearance; and The Case of the Lucky Legs for a genuinely witty script by Jerry Chodorov,
Brown Holmes and Ben Markson (the latter two were Warners hacks but Chodorov
was a major comedy writer and I suspect that, though he’s only credited with
“adaptation” of Gardner’s novel, he’s really responsible for the film’s marvelous
wit). Velvet Claws is much less
interesting and pretty much of a loser, redeemed only by Warners’ usual
professionalism and William’s élan
as this more aristocratic version of Mason — though Raymond Burr’s performance
on the 1950’s TV series remains the definitive reading of the character. —
11/29/07

•••••

Last night Charles and I squeezed in a relatively short
movie: The Case of the Velvet Claws, the
fourth of the six Perry Mason movies Warner Bros. made in the mid-1930’s and
the last one to star Warren William as Mason. Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator
of the Mason character, disliked William’s characterization of Mason because he
thought William made him too much of a gentleman — Gardner much preferred
Raymond Burr, his personal choice among three finalists for the part on the
1950’s/1960’s TV show, because Burr was more convincing as the roughneck
character Gardner had envisioned (my source for that story was a TV
Guide article years ago and no, it didn’t
name who the other two actors were) — and for the last two Warners Masons
William was replaced first by Ricardo Cortez (who, ironically, had preceded him
as Sam Spade by five years — Cortez played Spade in the 1931 version of The
Maltese Falcon and William played the
character, renamed “Ted Shayne,” in the second version, Satan Met a
Lady, from 1936) and then by Donald Woods.
(It’s a pity they didn’t tap Humphrey Bogart for the last one, not only because
Bogart had played an attorney quite capably in Marked Woman but it would have been nice to have all three screen Sam Spades also play Perry Mason.) The
Case of the Velvet Claws was for years the
most elusive of the Warners Masons because TNT, Ted Turner’s original movie
channel (unlike TCM it was a commercial channel but it did give me a chance to see a lot of films for the first
time, and from there I recorded a VHS tape of the 1931 Maltese Falcon that was my reference copy until a commercial DVD of
the 1941 version included the previous two as bonus items), showed the other
five in the series (including the surprisingly comic The Case of the
Lucky Legs, actually the best in the
series, and The Case of the Curious Bride, Errol Flynn’s U.S. debut, even though he was killed off-screen midway through the film and the only footage of him
was a silent flashback, about a minute and a half long, at the end indicating how
he died) but not Velvet Claws.

Perhaps the omission was due to the fact that Perry Mason marries his
long-suffering secretary Della Street (Claire Dodd) at the beginning of Velvet Claws — he bursts into the courtroom of an elderly female night-court judge
and demands that she perform the ceremony then and there, which she does —
though in the next film in the series, The Case of the Black Cat, the writers either quietly annulled the marriage or,
more likely, simply forgot about it and she went back to being merely Mason’s
secretary. Only their attempt to get away to the Pinehurst mountain lodge is
abruptly interrupted by Eva Stuart (the marvelous Winifred Shaw, a potentially
major talent Warners wasted), who holds a gun on him and gives him $5,000 in cash
as a retainer. What she expects Mason to do for the money is lobby Frank Locke
(Addison Richards), the editor of a sleazy tabloid called Spicy Bits that digs up stories with blackmail potential and
then offers to kill them if the subjects buy “advertising” in the paper, not to publish a story about rising politician Peter
Milnor (Kenneth Harlan) being caught at a roadhouse with a “mystery woman.” It
turns out that “Stuart” is actually Eva Belter, the wife of millionaire
stockbroker George C. Belter (Joseph King), who’s secretly the owner of Spicy
Bits. She was also the “mystery woman”
Milnor was with that night, and that’s the real reason she wants the story
spiked. At first Mason wants to return Eva’s retainer and reject the case, but
he can’t do that because his sidekick Paul “Spudsy” Drake (Eddie Acuff, an
infuriating comic-relief performance quite different from William Hopper’s cool
efficiency in the same role in the TV show!) has inadvertently burned Eva’s
bankroll while lighting a fire in Mason’s fireplace. (Grabbing what’s left of
the money, Della Street uses it to light her cigarette and says, “I’ve always
wondered what it would feel like to light a cigarette with a $1,000 bill” —
though as Charles pointed out, the bills on screen had Ulysses S. Grant’s
picture on them and therefore were $500’s.)

Eva’s next brilliant move (irony
intended) is to go to her husband and plead with him to kill the Spicy Bits story, but he decides to order Locke to publish the
story in order to punish her — so she pulls out her gun and holds it on him,
Sid Hickox’ camera discreetly dollies out and down a set of stairs, we hear two
gunshots and then see her fleeing, running into one of the servants as she
goes. Acting as her attorney, Mason visits the Belters’ home and finds two
bullet casings, and eventually deduces
that Eva’s shot missed and Belter’s real killer was his nephew Carl Griffin
(Gordon Elliott), who had just learned that Belter had disinherited his wife
and made his nephew the heir, and saw a chance to kill his uncle for the
inheritance and pin it on Eva. It’s a clever story, based on something Erle
Stanley Gardner published as a novel in 1933, though the movie never explains
the title (in the book, according to William K. Everson, the “Velvet Claws”
referred to “a piece of literally ‘catty’ anti-feminist propaganda”), and it’s
interesting for the sheer diversity of the company credits involved: the
opening copyright notice is to “Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. and the Vitaphone Corp.,”
the closing credit has the Warners logo and “A First National Picture,” and the
opening also featured the “Clue Club” series logo. Nicely directed by William
Clemens from a script by Tom Reed, Velvet Claws is a pleasant hour-long time filler and William, as
he had in the three previous films, makes a good Mason and offers a nicely
different “read” on the character from the powerful but often brusque and
unpleasant Raymond Burr. — 10/13/12

Friday, October 12, 2012

The film was The Divorce
of Lady X, a 1938 production by
Alexander Korda for which he kicked out the jams in both budget and talent,
spending lavishly to make the film in three-strip Technicolor (and though
Natalie Kalmus and William V. Skall were
there as color directors, cinematographer Harry Stradling and art directors
Lazare Meerson, Paul Sherriff and Alec Waugh were able to create a delightful
pastel look for the film quite different from the garish, overripe colors
American filmmakers using three-strip produced!) and hiring some killer talent:
the stars were Merle Oberon (Mrs. Alexander Korda) and Laurence Olivier, the
supporting cast included Ralph Richardson and Binnie Barnes, and the writers
were Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis and an uncredited Robert
Sherwood. The problem was the story, a plot by playwright Gilbert Wakefield
which Korda had already produced in 1933 under Wakefield’s original title, Counsel’s
Opinion: Everard Logan (Laurence
Olivier) is a top-notch divorce lawyer in 1938 London with a singularly low
view of women (in a courtroom scene almost unbearable in its blatant sexism, he
thunders, “Modern woman has disowned womanhood but refuses man’s obligations.
She demands freedom but won’t accept responsibility. She insists upon time to
develop her personality, and she spends it in cogitating on which part of her
body to paint next. Modern woman has no loyalty, decency, or justice; no
endurance, reticence, or self-control; no affection, fine feelings, or mercy.
In short, she is unprincipled, relentless, and exacting; idle, unproductive,
and tedious; unimaginative, humorless, and vain; vindictive, undignified, and
weak. And the sooner man takes out his whip again, the better for sanity and
progress”) who’s just come over after what he describes as “a rough crossing”
when an intense London fog means that his cabdriver bails on taking him home
because there’s utterly no visibility on the road. Instead he drops Logan at a
hotel where there’s a charity ball in progress — the ball has a Queen Victoria
theme, which means that everyone there (or at least the women) is dressed in
Victorian finery, including those ridiculously impractical hoop skirts
(remember that for the film Suez, set in France during the reign of Victoria’s contemporary Louis
Napoleon, the set designers actually had to widen the doorways so the costumes
designed for the film could fit through them!).

During the event, the
bandleader is told by the hotel manager to make an announcement that everyone
at the ball should stay there for the night and give up on any thought of going
home because the fog is making all the streets impassable — and the next half-hour of the film takes place
in the suite Logan rented just before the hotel totally ran out of rooms and
was reduced to asking their unwelcome guests to sleep on couches in the lobby.
Logan is asked by the manager if he can give up his suite to accommodate four
women; he refuses, but Leslie Steele (Merle Oberon), the granddaughter of a
judge before whom Logan frequently appears, crashes Logan’s room and by sheer
effrontery and gall manages to do him not only out of his room but out of his
bed (she gets to sleep in one of the room’s twin beds while he has to sleep on
the other bed’s mattress, laid out on the floor of the sitting room). The first
half-hour of the film basically stays in the hotel suite and, as Charles
pointed out, makes both Logan
and Leslie seem such unpleasant characters we wonder why we’re watching a film
about them and certainly aren’t
rooting for them to get together, even though (all too predictably, given the
conventions of English-speaking cinema on both sides of the Atlantic) Logan’s initial hatred for
this woman turns into love, or at least a crazed infatuation. The film then
mopes on to its main intrigue: Logan is visited in his office by Lord Mere
(Ralph Richardson), whose wife Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes) has had five previous
husbands in the space of as many years. Lord Mere wants a divorce because
supposedly a servant named Saunders (Gertrude Musgrove) caught her in a
potentially compromising position with four men in a suite at the same hotel
where Logan and Leslie had spent their night from heck — and Logan immediately
believes that Leslie is Lady Mere and he’s the mystery man she was caught in
the hotel room with, even though nothing really happened (at least nothing
sexual). The movie keeps Logan in the dark as to Leslie’s true identity for the
remainder of its 91-minute running time, using some of the same subterfuges as
Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott pulled in their script for the Astaire-Rogers
musical Top Hat, and when we finally meet
the real Lady Mere (Binnie Barnes)
the expected fireworks from the confrontations between her and Leslie, and
between her and Logan, turn out to be wet squibs. Charles summed up the movie
when the scene cut to a man playing the cimbalom at a Hungarian
restaurant/nightclub (Alexander Korda often filled his movies with reminders
that though he achieved fame and success in Britain, his native country was
Hungary, and at times his credit lists look like he was running a
full-employment program for Hungarians in the U.K.) and he said, “With all the
talent in this movie, it’s amazing that the cimbalom player is the most
entertaining thing we’ve seen so far.”

It occurred to me that The Divorce of
Lady X was the sort of film that
could have been better with a more appropriate cast; the part of Logan in
particular cried out for Cary Grant (a native Brit who achieved his greatest
fame in the U.S.) and got Laurence Olivier, whose disgust with the whole idea
of movie acting in general and this movie in particular seemed to hang over his
head like a pall in every frame. It’s well known that he couldn’t stand Merle
Oberon, both on this movie and the far better one they made together the
following year (Wuthering Heights, filmed in Hollywood with Sam Goldwyn producing and William Wyler
directing; Olivier later conceded that it wasn’t until he worked with Wyler
that he realized that in movie acting less often was more and that he should tone
down his gestures and intonations instead of booming every line and throwing
every move “big” the way he was used to doing on stage, but he was also bitter
that he wasn’t co-starring with his fiancée, Vivien Leigh, and denounced Oberon
to one of his friends as “a cheap pick-up by Korda”). Ironically, Korda had
produced a film of the same play in 1933, Counsel’s Opinion, with another expatriate American director — Allan
Dwan on the earlier version and Tim Whelan here — and with Binnie Barnes
starring as Leslie, whereas this time around she was demoted to the supporting
role. Her Logan was Harry Kendall, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s marvelous
1931 film Rich and Strange (and Olivier, as the star of Rebecca, also had a Hitchcock connection!), and that might
be a film worth seeing if only for Dwan’s direction: Whelan directed The
Divorce of Lady X as if his characters were
swimming under water, and the deadly, stately pace at which this moves
completely undermines his attempts at French farce — or any other sort of
humor, for that matter. The part of Leslie needed either someone more charming
(like Claudette Colbert) or someone more overwhelming (like Katharine Hepburn;
with her and Grant in the leads and Howard Hawks directing, one could readily
imagine this movie as a comedy classic at the level of Bringing Up Baby); Oberon isn’t convincing as either a nice girl or
a bitch, and while that’s not the biggest problem with The Divorce of Lady X that’s certainly one of them!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

I ran Charles the videotape of the 1938 (release date;
actually it was filmed in 1937) film Hollywood Hotel. It was Busby Berkeley’s last big-budget musical at
Warner Brothers (after that he ran out his contract doing “B” movies, including
a surprising number of non-musicals, then moved on to MGM, taking a cut in his
own salary in hopes of once again getting major budgets to work with), and on that score it’s a disappointment — there is not
one single great big production
extravaganza, despite the fact that some of Johnny Mercer’s song lyrics seem to
cry out for the full-scale treatment. One could only imagine what Berkeley,
given the front-office O.K. and the money, could have done with the song “Let
That Be a Lesson to You,” with its repeated line about being “behind the
eight-ball.” At the end of the number as it stands (one of the kinds of things
that would become much more common in musicals in the next decade, when, as
Arlene Croce put it, “the song-and-dance impulse seemed to become pandemic,”
when Dick Powell sings the song as a waiter at a drive-in restaurant and
hundreds of customers come in, enthralled by the sound of his voice, and join
in), a giant eight-ball rolls in and covers the face of one of the actors — and
I couldn’t help but think, “This is how a Busby Berkeley number should start.”

Benny Goodman and his orchestra are in it — which led
Goodman discographers Warren Hicks and Russell Connor to call this the greatest
swing movie ever made — which it isn’t. It might have been if they’d given the
Goodman Gang more to do (and this was
his most famous band, with Harry James and Gene Krupa both prominently featured
before they went on to become bandleaders themselves), but all we get from them
is a brief appearance in the opening number, “Hooray for Hollywood,” and a
rehearsal sequence later in the film where they do part of the famous “Sing, Sing, Sing” arrangement (from
the “Christopher Columbus” interpolation to the end, which at least gives us a
chance to see the marvelous part of the song in which Goodman goes back to his klezmer roots during a long solo passage in which he’s
backed only by Krupa’s drums) and
the quartet plays a bit of an almost unrecognizable song called “I’ve Got a
Heartful of Music.” With the opening theme statement left on the cutting-room
floor, it’s difficult to tell what
song the quartet is playing — but at least Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton got
to show their African-American faces on the same screen as Goodman and Krupa,
and this is almost certainly the first Hollywood musical that showed a racially
mixed band. But it’s difficult to call this the greatest swing movie ever made
when Goodman’s numbers are truncated while we get every damned suffocating,
infuriating note of a Raymond Paige concert arrangement of “Dark Eyes” (a.k.a.
“Otchichorniya” — at least that’s the transliteration in Clive Hirschhorn’s
book The Hollywood Musical) that
makes Paul Whiteman sound like Count Basie by comparison.

Hollywood Hotel is a
movie that isn’t altogether bad — in fact, it’s quite entertaining; it’s just
such a bundle of frustratingly missed opportunities that in the end it’s only
moderately good. The screenplay by Jerry Wald (later a producer and supposedly
the real-life model for Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s novel What
Makes Sammy Run?), Maurice Leo and Richard
Macaulay is actually genuinely witty, and Lola Lane and Alan Mowbray are quite
amusing as impossibly hammy and ludicrously pampered and spoiled Hollywood
stars (Lane’s real-life sister Rosemary is her much nicer stunt double and the
female lead), while Glenda Farrell turns in one of her no-nonsense performances
as Lola Lane’s much put-upon secretary. We also get a glimpse (quite a few
glimpses, actually) of Louella Parsons, hosting the “Hollywood Hotel” radio
program on which virtually every star name in Hollywood was compelled to appear
for free, with the threat of being savaged in Parsons’ subsequent columns if
they dared to say no. It’s the sort of movie that’s nice the way it is but
could have been a lot better with
some more elaborate production numbers (the almost surrealistic lyric of the
Mercer/Richard Whiting song “I’m Like a Fish Out of Water,” which Dick Powell
sings to Rosemary Lane to woo her the night he’s taken her, posing as the
glamorous star, to a premiere — ending with a surprisingly suggestive scene for
1937 in which they dunk themselves in the hotel’s fountain, come up with each
other’s shoes on their feet, then kick the shoes away just before the fadeout, seems to invite a grand
old-fashioned Berkeley extravaganza) and with more Benny Goodman. — 1/31/98

•••••

Charles and I had a nice long evening of movie-watching last
night in which we got in a feature and two shorts. The feature was Hollywood
Hotel, filmed in July 1937 at Warner Bros.,
released in January 1938 and featured in the Warner Home Video Busby
Berkeley Collection, Volume 2 which I
bought to get the last two Gold Diggers movies (Gold Diggers of 1937 and Gold Diggers in Paris)
and also the 15 minutes’ worth of extant footage from the first Gold
Diggers movie, Gold Diggers of
Broadway from 1929, included as a bonus
track with Gold Diggers of 1937.Hollywood
Hotel was a movie Charles and I first
watched in the late 1990’s (when he still lived in a studio apartment on Centre
Street in Hillcrest) and one I’d been interested in because the Benny Goodman
bio-discography B.G. On the Record
by D. Russell Connor and Warren W. Hicks enthused about it, calling it “the
band’s — and any band’s — best film.” After seeing it with that encomium in my
mind I was very disappointed; not
only isn’t it Goodman’s best film, it’s not even his best collaboration with
Busby Berkeley: their other movie
together, The Gang’s All Here (20th
Century-Fox, 1943), is far more spectacular, benefiting from Technicolor,
Carmen Miranda (the marriage of her
talents and Berkeley’s was made in heaven!) and — most importantly — a bigger
budget for Berkeley’s spectacular production numbers.

By the time of Hollywood
Hotel the market for Berkeley’s
extravaganzae was diminishing — audiences were realizing that Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers could “say” more on a dance floor with just each other than all
Berkeley’s platoons of hot-looking short-skirted or hot-pantsed chorines moving
their legs to form kaleidoscope patterns — and Jack Warner responded by cutting
Berkeley’s budgets and in particular the size of his personnel. Hollywood
Hotel has spectacular sets rivaling
anything in Berkeley’s previous Warner Bros. films — the lobby of the titular
hostelry looks gigantic enough he could have staged a production number in it,
and the “Orchid Room” where the Hollywood Hotel radio program was broadcast (hosted by Louella
Parsons, who plays herself in the movie and who managed to blackmail all the
major stars into doing her radio show without pay by threatening to write nasty
items about them in her widely read column about Hollywood if they didn’t) is
dominated by huge plaster orchids and it looks like the Hindenburg could have landed inside it, while the Hollywood
Hotel house orchestra led by Raymond Paige
is itself so large it could have successfully defended Pearl Harbor if it had
been armed with guns instead of instruments. What Berkeley didn’t get to do is fill those big sets with chorus girls
and maneuver them; his direction is capable enough (just before he left Warner
Bros. he’d prove with the quite good thriller They Made Me a Criminal that he could make an entertaining movie that wasn’t
a musical at all) and he keeps the action moving — this is one film in which he
directed the whole movie and not just the numbers — but all too often the
numbers seem to stop just when they’re getting interesting: when the song “Let
That Be a Lesson to You” ends with a giant eight-ball rolling itself in front
of Edgar Kennedy’s face, we can’t help but think, “This is how a Busby Berkeley
number should begin.”

Ironically,
I liked Hollywood Hotel a lot
more this time around, more for the script than for either Berkeley or Goodman— who gets to
do about half of “Sing, Sing, Sing” and whose racially integrated quartet,
consisting of white musicians Goodman on clarinet and Gene Krupa on drums with
African-Americans Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes, was the first mixed band ever shown on film. They do a song called
“I’ve Got a Heartful of Music” and the number is abruptly cut into during a
rehearsal sequence in the Orchid Room (the same scene in which “Sing, Sing,
Sing” is performed), obviously so it could be deleted in prints shown in the
American South. Other than that the Goodman band is simply spackled into scenes
otherwise featuring the Warner Bros. studio orchestra and Johnnie “Scat” Davis,
a white singer-mugger-trumpet player who, like Louis Prima, obviously worked
out this act because he thought “white Louis Armstrong” would be a potentially
successful market niche. He sings the opening song, “Hooray for Hollywood,”
with the backing alternating between the studio orchestra and Goodman’s band,
which then plays “California, Here I Come” as part of the sendoff they’re
giving saxophonist Ronnie Bowers (Dick Powell, top-billed), who’s won a 10-week
contract with the fictitious “All-Star Pictures” studio. Later the song “Let
That Be a Lesson to You” starts out as part of the Hollywood Hotel broadcast with Goodman’s band playing it and Johnnie
“Scat” Davis singing it, only to dissolve into a sequence at Callahan’s Diner,
where Ronnie has taken a job after his career as an All-Star contractee lasted
only one day. After the Orchid Room rehearsal sequence that’s the only really
extended look we get at Goodman all movie, the band and Benny are invisible
until they make a cameo appearance in the final mix of “Hooray for Hollywood”
with which the film ends. Two other songs, a lovely ballad called “Can’t Teach
My Old Heart New Tricks” and a hot instrumental, “House Hop,” which the Goodman
band had recorded before the film was made, were filmed but not used in the
final cut.

Ironically, the best element in Hollywood Hotel is neither Berkeley’s direction nor Goodman’s
contribution but the wisecracking script by Jerry Wald (later a major
producer), Richard Macaulay (spelled “Macauley” on the credits even though,
under his correct spelling, he was one of Warners’ most prolific writers) and
Maurice Leo, full of animadversions about diva-ism and the whole appalling mess
stardom makes of one’s life — though the funniest wisecrack in the movie is
about Ronnie Bowers when he arrives at the Hollywood airport and a publicity
photographer asks if they’re really going to make a movie star out of someone
that homely. “Don’t forget — they made a star of Rin Tin Tin!,” says Ronnie’s
buddy, comic-relief sidekick and (eventually) manager Fuzzy (Ted Healy, making
his next-to-last movie before his sudden death — Healy was the man who put
together the Three Stooges as just that, the stooges in his vaudeville act,
only in 1934 MGM kept Healy under contract but dropped the Stooges; the Stooges
signed with Columbia and made shorts there for 23 years, while Healy went on to
an interesting and varied career as a character actor, including a serious role
in the 1935 horror film Mad Love,
until his sudden death in 1937 shortly after this film was premiered) — to
which the onlooker says, “Yeah, but at least he could bark.” (That’s a double in-joke, since Rin Tin
Tin was a Warners star and his films’ profits helped the studio stay in
business in its difficult early years — but those were silent movies, meaning
the audiences may have seen him
bark but they didn’t hear him!)
The plot has All-Star’s mega-star, Mona Marshall (Lola Lane), scheduled to go
to the premiere of her new movie, Glamour Girl, with Alexander “Alex” Dupray (Alan Mowbray), her
fiancé and frequent co-star — only Mona has a diva hissy-fit and flees to Santa
Barbara. Having advertised that Mona Marshall would appear at her career,
studio head R. L. Paulkin (Grant Mitchell) hits on the idea of passing off
Mona’s stunt double, Virginia Stanton (Rosemary Lane, Lola’s real-life sister)
— whose own hopes for a picture career have gone nowhere since she so closely
resembles Mona (a plot gimmick Warners used again in the 1943 film Thank
Your Lucky Stars with Eddie Cantor in both
roles) — as Mona at the premiere and having Ronnie Bowers, on his first day in
Hollywood, escort her, since Alex would have recognized immediately that
Virginia was not Mona.

Naturally, Ronnie likes honest, down-to-earth Virginia a
lot better than he would have stuck-up prima donna Mona, and the two fall in love even though, once
Mona and Alex learn of the deception, they demand that Ronnie be fired and he
ends up working at Callahan’s drive-in diner for the typically irascible Edgar
Kennedy, who gets to do some nice slow burns and ends up smashing most of his
own dishes even though one can’t help but wish Harpo Marx would come along and
wade through his lemonade again. Fired at Callahan’s, Ronnie and Fuzzy (who’d
hired on as a dishwasher and run up a tab — every time something broke Callahan
would say, “That comes out of your salary!” — approaching the size of the U.S.
budget deficit now) are so
desperately broke they have to walk
to All Star Studio’s when a director there offers Ronnie a part — though it’s
not an on-screen one: it’s just to record three songs as Alexander Dupray’s
voice double in the Civil War-themed musical Love and Glory, his and Mona’s next film. The movie is a hit at its
premiere and the stars are invited to appear on Louella Parsons’ Hollywood
Hotel radio program — where Dupray, who
can’t sing a note, is going to be expected to sing his big songs from the new
film. A panicky Paulkin tries to locate Ronnie to get him to do the Phantom
Broadcast number and sing Dupray’s songs
off-stage while Dupray lip-synchs — only Ronnie refuses to sing on a broadcast
except in full view of the audience, and when he finally does agree it’s at a fee of $1,000 per song. Then
Virginia, disguising herself as Mona again, lures Dupray into a car and drives
him to a deserted country road and lets him out again so he misses the
broadcast, Ronnie gets to show his face as he sings the big songs, and when
Mona comes on to him he rejects her in favor of Virginia, he gets a big All
Star contract and everyone lives happily.

Hollywood Hotel apparently aroused the ire of the real Hollywood
Hotel as well as Campbell’s Soup, the sponsor of Louella Parsons’ broadcast,
neither of whom had been asked for permission to use their names (though not
only Parsons but virtually the whole announcing staff of the real-life show
appeared in the film — and so does ace Warners makeup man Perc Westmore, who’s
shown making Virginia up to look like Mona) — and Johnnie “Scat” Davis’s antics
aroused the ire of Benny Goodman. Apparently Davis managed to persuade some of
the “suits” at Warners that he should be included in the song “Sing, Sing,
Sing,” either by playing a trumpet solo to be spliced into Goodman’s
pre-recording or by synchronizing on-screen to the solo actually played by
Harry James (his film debut). They were going to shoot this in the dead of
night so Goodman wouldn’t find out about it until they finished the film, but
Goodman did find out about it
ahead of time and said that if Johnnie “Scat” Davis either got spliced into
“Sing, Sing, Sing” or synched to Harry James’ solo, he would pull out of the
film and take his whole band with him. Hollywood Hotel emerges as an interesting souvenir of Louella
Parsons’ radio program (though because her show, not the Goodman band, was
considered the main commercial attraction we get every ghastly note of Raymond
Paige’s God-awful arrangement of “Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya,” a.k.a. “Dark Eyes,” and
only a brutally cut-down version of Goodman’s deathless swing masterpiece
“Sing, Sing, Sing”!) and it’s got some great gags (including Mona Marshall’s
incredibly nelly queen-stereotype dress designer going by the nickname
“Butch”!) and nice songs by Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer (whose
contribution deserves note for his dazzling, Cole Porter-ish “list” lyric for
“I’m Just a Fish Out of Water,” with the deathless line, “Like Justice Van
Devanter/Doing an Eddie Cantor” — Justice Willis Van Devanter was one of the
Right-wing crazies on the U.S. Supreme Court that was throwing out President
Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation), and though it’s disappointing as a Goodman
showcase it’s still nice to see bits of Benny’s two most famous bands (the big
band with Harry James and Gene Krupa, and the quartet with Krupa, Wilson and
Hampton) captured at their very best.

Incidentally, Goodman and his band
recorded four of the songs from the film (including one, “Can’t Teach My Old
Heart New Tricks,” which wasn’t used in the final cut — according to one
report, Harry James subbed for Krupa on drums on that one) with Goodman’s
regular band singer, Martha Tilton, who sang them much more musically than
either Johnnie “Scat” Davis or Dick Powell, and on the October 22, 1937 session
the band not only recorded three songs from the movie but also did a fourth
piece, “Popcorn Man,” which was slated for release March 14, 1938 and abruptly
pulled from the market one week later. “All releases were recalled (most were still
in the hands of distributors, not retailers),” Connor and Hicks wrote. “All
labels were scrapped, and masters of the take issued and all alternate takes
were destroyed.” Why, one wonders, did RCA Victor not only pull the record so
abruptly but attempt with Stalinist efficiency to wipe out any trace of its
existence? When “Popcorn Man” finally returned to print (courtesy of one of
only about 10 copies that survived, and in inferior sound quality to the rest
of the album because it was mastered from a commercial pressing rather than the
lost original matrix) as part of a 1960 Goodman LP on RCA’s budget label,
Camden, the liner notes hinted that there was something objectionable about the
song that had led a Victor executive to order its suppression — and, given that
I first acquired this LP in the late 1960’s in the middle of the sex, drugs
& rock ’n’ roll hippie Zeitgeist,
I immediately concluded that “popcorn man” must have been 1930’s slang for a
drug dealer and someone at the company had caught on that that was what the
song really meant. (Yet,
according to Connor and Hicks, a Jimmy Dorsey record of “Popcorn Man” on Decca
went out without any hitch.) — 10/9/12